Thomas Wier          

How to contact me: Dept. of Linguistics  University of Chicago  1010 E. 59th Street Chicago, IL 60637  Email: trwier at uchicago dot edu           thomas underscore wier at              eva dot mpg dot de Curriculum Vitæ: [PDF]  [HTML] I'm a graduate student in the department of Linguistics at the University of Chicago. My professional interests in linguistics are varied, but I take special interest in two particular linguistic regions: the languages of North American plains and those of the Caucasus, particularly the Algonquian and Kartvelian families, respectively. Within these areas, I'm most concerned with issues of morphosyntax and grammatical relations: case-assignment, ergativity, valence changing operations, feature theory, etc.   My dissertation discusses all of these things at some level, seeking to explain the formal and typological properties of feature hierarchies.

I see myself as motivated by a strong descriptive spirit, however, and so I often veer into other areas. I have for instance recently taken an interest in the extinct, poorly documented, and even more poorly understood aboriginal languages of south Texas, particularly Comecrudan, for which I am composing a brief grammar based on the scant material available.

In my spare time, when not working for the Chicago Linguistic Society or otherwise keeping abreast of linguistic issues, I read as much as possible: mostly world history, especially certain periods and places, like Imperial China, the Hellenistic Mediterranean, Texas, Byzantium, or Europe during the Old Regime.  I seem to acquire a lot of different kinds of books, however. (To see, take a look at my wishlist). I also like foreign films, especially those of Akira Kurosawa, Pier-Paolo Pasolini, and Ingmar Bergman.  As a hobby, I collect usually literary antique books -- my earliest is a Greco-Latin Bible from 1550.

Varia

    • Looking for some other Thomas Wier? Here are a bunch of people who're not me.
    • Are you a Texan? Here're some ways to see if you are
    • My blog, my very own personal soapbox-cum-moviereview-cum-bookreview
    • Wier Family genealogy - or at least, what might be our genealogy...
    • Some images of my antique books
    • Sundry travel photos.